I recently did some work for one of my colleagues and was reminded how great it feels when you do something and get feedback. Today’s tip is to give feedback. Often, legal research is shared among many and giving feedback will reinforce all the positive aspects of sharing access to work product.

If you are using someone else’s prior work as part of your research, let them know that it was helpful. Let them know that by properly citing the cases and legislation you were able to note things up. Let them know that by listing the texts and other …

Today’s short legal research tip is this:

You will find better answers to questions if you know Why you are asking them in the first place.

Understanding the motivation for an answer that is hidden behind a question helps reveal biases, suppositions, assumptions and missing inputs that, if misunderstood, lead to incomplete, incorrect, and inefficiently gathered results.

I think about this whenever I momentarily worry that artificial intelligence will make librarians obsolete.…

If you are doing research in the area of human rights, you might find HuriSearch a useful addition to your toolbox.

HuriSearch offers a fairly sophisticated front end, allowing you to query any of four types of source (NGOs, national human rights institutions, academic institutions, and intergovernmental organizations), search in any of sixteen languages, and use word variations if you wish. As well, search results can be filtered by facets: source type, source organization, country, and document format. Furthermore, you’re offered a permalink to your search and an RSS feed, so that you can stay up-to-date.

To my joy (and …

Finding an expert or seeing if an expert has been qualified as such can be a challenging legal research exercise. Here are some tips and links to help you.

Tip 1

Use the Canadian Expert Witness Directory through Litigator on WestlawNext Canada. The directory links to cases the expert has been qualified in. You need a WNC password and access to the Litigator component for  this of course, but it is a great place to start.

Tip 2

To find out if there are experts on your issue whose expertise has been qualified by the courts, search on CanLII …

Today’s research tip is more about research output than gathering. Do not be afraid to use colour to add visual clues to your research output. Using coloured text or tables is not appropriate for pleadings of course, but why not present your client with some visual clues in your opinions?

For instance, a table showing research results representing a quantum of damages could have background colour with the high low and mid-range results.  If your organization incorporates colour into your brand, this colour wheel will help with shading.

For instance, if your colour is purple, shading a table or even …

Thanks to Sooin Kim, Faculty Services Librarian with the Bora Laskin Law Library, University of Toronto there is another type of link creation tool to share.  Thess tools are made for a specific purpose – to assist with building links to material that will be used at law schools.

Sooin shared the WestlawNext Link Creator https://lawschool.westlaw.com/admin/wllinkcreator/wllinkcreator.aspx. It is a nifty little tool that will build a link to a specific citation, a KeyCite record, a particular database or to a specific query.  It also offers the link in three formats: URL, Iframe, and Hypertext link with all of …

To continue the theme from the last couple of weeks, Today’s Tip is about linking in to CanLII.  The tips for WestlawNext Canada and LexisNexis Canada have been about linking to a specific source within the services and that makes sense for CanLII as well.

Stable, predictable, readable URLs are one of the truly wonderful things about CanLII.

What is the start page for searching Statutes and Regulations of Alberta?

http://www.canlii.org/en/ab/laws/index.html

How about Ontario legislation?

http://www.canlii.org/en/on/laws/index.html

The legislation of Manitoba?

http://www.canlii.org/en/mb/laws/index.html

The pattern for decisions is also very predictable and stable. The case R. …

Last week, I gave a shout out to Ted Tjaden for sharing some info about deep linking to LexisNexis Canada sources, and I am continuing to thank Ted this week. Ted shared some information about deep linking into WestlawNext Canada.

Deep-linking to the Canadian Abridgment:

https://nextcanada.westlaw.com/Browse/Home/AbridgmentTOC/TOR.XVI.6/View.html (this should be strict liability, rule in Rylands v Fletcher)

When you are in the Abridgment, you can usually get the abridgment schema code and simply insert it in the foregoing URL.  The portion of the URL above that is the schema code is TOR.XVI.

I have had good luck with jumping …

Hat tip to Ted Tjaden for Today’s Tip. Ted is a fan of deep linking to sources including fee based sources of legal research.  I am a fan of Ted, including his excellent Irwin Law text Legal Research and Writing which has a companion website. Ted recently shared the pattern of how to deep link to specific material in LexisNexis Canada.

As you may know, not all databases in QL give you the “hyperlink” option.The following pattern gives you a stable URL to a single database:

ICLIP = http://www.lexisnexis.com/ca/legal/search/UrlApiShowSearch.do?sfi=CA03STCmtrySrch&csi=281866

The only variable is the CSI number. You can get …

Today’s tip is a reminder that web delivered content may display or act differently depending on your browser and the size of your browser window. If it is possible in your organization, use more than one web browser.

To highlight this tip, I will show you three versions of Lexbox, a groovy new research tracking service that is available from Lexum at mylexbox.com.

Chrome – full screen:

IE – full screen:

Firefox – Full screen:

Note the very minor differences in where your see down arrows and …